


Don't Stop Believin'

by chaoticlivi



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Past Child Abuse, Song: Don't Stop Believin'
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-21 04:13:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17635826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticlivi/pseuds/chaoticlivi
Summary: She might count as a small-town girl, raised in a town where everyone knows her father a little too well. And he probably counts as a city boy, at a loss about what to do now that he's completed the performative task of graduating from MSU. Either way, they definitely both took the midnight train going anywhere.





	Don't Stop Believin'

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Marsh, Kat, and Lunar for the beta work~!

Maka holds her bag close, heart pounding, while she waits on the platform in crisp air. None of the local wildlife has started chirping yet.

She’s an adult. This is totally within her rights. Sure, it’s a little abrupt, but it’s her right to be spontaneous, too! She is not responsible for her father’s mental health. He’ll find the note and know nothing bad has happened to her. Even if he panics and calls the police, they can’t do anything to stop an adult who has clearly indicated where she’s going.

Maka takes a deep breath to refocus on what’s ahead and looks at the long list of stops posted beneath a grubby plastic cover. The train that comes through here will go all the way to Boston if she stays on long enough, and the plan is to stay on until she just can’t stand it anymore.

Admittedly, it has its risks. But she’s saved up for this, and she deserves a good adventure after slogging through four lonely years of English undergrad at a tiny school that everyone left after graduation. Her funds are enough to live on for a solid month and a half before she needs a paycheck from whatever job she can find, as long as she’s frugal and doesn’t choose an expensive neighborhood to live in.

She doesn’t like how much money anxiety has consumed her. Her father’s home, rife as it is with visitors she doesn’t approve of, is absolutely safe. What if she has an emergency before she’s able to get health insurance? Would Papa tell her not to come back?

 _Well_ , snarls the voice of grim determination, _I’m not crawling back there, anyway. He drove away Mama, and maybe worse, Mama’s departure didn’t teach him a damn thing_. Papa will probably never change. Maka might have to choose between accepting a father who’s a philanderer or disowning him for the rest of their lives.

Loath though she is to admit it, Maka hates losing people. Even her gross dad. Maybe someday they’ll heal. But she does know it will never happen if she doesn’t get some time to herself.

The station is dingy and empty. Her thoughts seem to echo off the walls.

===

Soul blinks at the split-flap display. The scheduled arrival times are all after midnight. It’s...it’s pretty fucking late. If he’d been paying attention, he’d have realized it, but everything since he made this decision has been a blur.

His heart pounds. It doesn’t matter where he goes; all that matters is that he takes control of his own life, far enough away from his family where they can’t control him. Soul wonders, guiltily, if the money he has could be considered “stolen”. It was in his bank account - the saved remnants of Christmas and birthday gifts from the past few years, since he couldn’t think of what to spend it on - but it had been given by a family who believed he was going to be a good little Evans and follow the family tradition. Maybe they wouldn’t have given him anything if they’d known he was just going to abscond with it.

In the end, Soul thinks he’s probably doing them a favor by striking out on his own. Sure, they’ll be disappointed, but not as disappointed as they will be in a decade or two if he keeps trying to fit in here.

He plunks his backpack down on a bench, the next train not due for a while. Maybe there’s something wrong with him for wanting to leave, but the blank darkness of the track disappearing into the night is, all things considered, more promising than the yawning emptiness of making a mediocre living as the Second-Best Evans Kid.

===

Maka boards the train with her pulse in her throat and is greeted with an empty car. She sits in the first seat by the door, dumbfounded for a moment by her own decision, and lets a few stops pass by. For each of the first few towns the train passes through, a new feeling of panic swells in her heart as she pictures herself getting farther from home.

Then a kind of manic excitement sets in. The dim lighting in the train still bothers her with its depressing cast, and she’s too restless to be alone with her thoughts. A little after the lights of Detroit pass her window, Maka gets up and heads over to the door opposite where she boarded. Beyond that lies the threshold between cars; she goes through it, lingering for a moment while the tracks clack by below.

She hasn’t seen anyone get on her car, and at first glance, it looks like this next one will be the same--

Oh, wait. There’s a shock of white hair she’d initially missed, one lonely person among the seats. His face becomes clearer as she gets closer - a young man, probably close to her age. He’s slouched down in a black-and-burgundy sweater, head rolled toward the window, eyes closed. She weighs the rudeness of approaching a sleeping person on a midnight train and decides she’s too badly in need of human proximity, _any_ human proximity, to worry about being awkward.

The seats are three deep. Thinking she can sit in the far one without waking him after all, Maka makes her way down the aisle, only to be fixed with a pair of red eyes.

“Oh, wasn’t planning to bother you,” she whispers in a hurried stage-voice, and gestures at the aisle seat. “Is this seat taken?”

===

Soul doesn’t have words ready in his mouth at this hour (or any hour, if he’s being honest), so he just kind of stares.

“Okay,” says the young woman, trying, it seems, to be quieter than she actually is. She’s small but has a lot of presence, piercing green eyes above a black leather jacket and...combat boots?

“I’ll, uh, sit here then?”

He musters a shrug. She sits near him, but puts her bag between them and pulls out a book. For a long while, she’s silent. Although it’s a bit strange for her to sit here when the whole train is empty, he supposes some people just can’t mind their own business. Anyway, he’s not going to be very interesting to sit near. Soul puts his head back and dozes, exhaustion finally catching up again.

“Hmm...can’t decide where to get off,” his neighbor muses out loud. Soul turns toward her, not sure why she would choose to share this information.

“How about you?” she asks, searching his face. She seems like one of those painfully earnest people, and Soul gets the distinct feeling that talking will comfort her.

“I...actually don’t know, either,” he admits. It sounds even more ridiculous rolling off his tongue into the real world.

“Huh. What do you mean? You’re not sure what your stop is called?”

“Umm, no. I haven’t decided on a destination.”

“Really!” the stranger exclaims, brightening, her excitement jolting him further from sleep. “How far are you going?”

“Mmm, not sure--”

“Are you doing the same thing I am?!”

“Uh - maybe? It depends what you’re doing. I’m just looking to find a new city. Like anywhere, almost. I’m trying to not be picky.”

The stranger holds out her hand. “I’m Maka. Maka Albarn. I didn’t realize I would meet anyone else out there with the same plan.”

Soul takes her hand and shakes it. “I’m Soul, and it’s not much of a plan.”

She smiles. There’s mischief in there. “Yeah, that’s the point.”

He flashes a little grin in some attempt to act welcoming, newly invested in not driving her away. “So, how long you been on this train, anyway?”

“Since Dyer Town, but I had to walk from the other side.”

“Yikes. You’ve been on longer than me. I just boarded at Detroit Station.”

“Ah, is that where you’re from?”

“Pretty much. I’m from Carillon Cove.”

Maka makes a little face, and he should be offended - almost wants to be offended - but she’s not wrong, and anyway, she wipes it off her face immediately. “That’s kind of like, south of the main city, right? On the river?”

“Yeah, and I don’t like it very much,” Soul says.

“Oh. What’s wrong with it?” Maka asks innocently. “I’ve never been there.” Ah-hah. If Little Miss Earnest truthfully has no preconceptions about his neighborhood, then he’s the Pope; Carillon Cove has a strong, deserved reputation for snobbery.

“Nothing-- well-- I guess it depends? I don’t feel like I belong there.”

“Ah. Well, what exactly brings you out here?”

Soul can feel himself starting to shut down. “I just...don’t like it.” He’s not ready to talk about his family to a stranger yet.

“Oh. I gotcha.” Maka shrugs, leaves her gaze on him for a beat. To his enormous relief, she lets it go and returns to her book. It’s like she passed some kind of test he didn’t know he was giving.

===

The train clatters onward and onward. Stop after stop, Maka tells herself, _Not yet, not yet, not yet_. Even when the morning commuters start to get on, yawning and brusque as they shuffle past her aisle seat, she doesn’t move. Not yet.

She’s eight hours from home - nine, if she counts the time it takes to lug a duffel full of clothes from Papa’s house to the train station. The sun is coming up, and the name of their next stop scrolls by the ticker above the door.

“Cleveland,” she says out loud. Soul glances at her. They’ve been quiet since he suddenly withdrew from the conversation; he dozed, tiny little snores keeping her company, but she wasn’t able to let go of consciousness. “I think...this is my stop.”

“Oh?” Soul follows her gaze to the illuminated letters. “Cleveland, huh…”

“The idea of staying on this train through the morning commute makes me want to jump out the window,” Maka confesses. “And anyway, I heard that the cost of living here isn’t bad. I don’t know how you’re doing, but me - I need to get something affordable.”

Soul nods. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

He stares into the light mist rolling over the neighborhood outside, and the train begins to slow. She thinks this is the last time they’ll ever talk, opening her mouth to thank him for keeping her company, when he shuffles in his seat. “Maybe I’ll get out here, too? I mean. All I wanted was something different.”

Maka smiles. She hopes it isn’t weird to encourage him to come with her, but he shows no sign of wanting to get away. With their small baggage in hand and on their backs, they disembark the train as if they were truly traveling together to start with, avoiding the tired crowds as one.

Maka sends her ticket through the automated machine and winces as it tells her, “NOT ENOUGH FUNDS.”

“I guess that’s what I get for boarding a train and just going for eight hours,” Maka says. She uses the credit card slot to shove the rest of her debt away, trying not to think about it too hard. Soul, whose ticket went through just fine, waits for her outside the gate.

“Hey, uh,” he suggests, apparently very interested in his shoes (one of which does, admittedly, have a neat little Sharpie doodle on it), “if you’d like, we could share a motel room. There’s gotta be something cheap available. And then we could take a day or two so each of us can look for an apartment.”

Maka’s been warned a thousand times against staying with strangers, especially strange men. It’s not a good idea. And yet…

...There’s something about him, maybe the fact that they’d been alone together in an otherwise-empty train car already. Hell, maybe it’s something about _her_ : the fact that she’s pinching every penny she can.

Either way, she takes the leap. “Sure.”


End file.
